I was in Moscow last weekend on business and was looking forward to catching up with the action from Griffin Park after an intense day’s work.
It was 7pm Moscow time … working that out as 5pm in London. The match at home to Portsmouth was finished. But instead of going straight to the results page I thought it would be far more exciting, if a little bit nerve-racking, to back-check @Beesotted’s Twitter feed – quite literally a blow by blow account of every minute of the game. So there I was sitting in my hotel room praying for victory as I scrolled back in time trying not to see too many spoilers.
The phone rang. Pressure from very hospitable Muscovite hosts to go out for the evening. So instead of trying to find the start of the game I decided to stop trawling and hit on a tweet at random. It was 0-0. Relieved I pressed on, scanning for good news and sure enough, very soon:
Goal
Goal Bradley Wright-Phillips
Yeeeeeees
Even though you know the game has finished @beesotted puts you right there in the Ealing Road.
Minutes later Pompey equalize. Bollocks. My rational head is telling me that you can’t change a game that’s finished but you can’t resist willing it to change…. “COME ON!!” … I was sitting in my hotel room cheering on my team in a match that had finished. Quite sad really.
But it was not to be.
The final tweet I saw
FT 1-1. Dominated early but faltered
I misconstrued.
What the tweet had actually said was:
HT 1-1. Dominated early but faltered
I had got confused by the time zone. Moscow is actually three hours ahead of London and not two and it was in fact half-time as I strolled out for a few swifties … Not full-time.
I left the hotel slightly peeved that we had only taken one point from lowly Pompey.
When I got back to the hotel much later I checked Twitter again for some post-match commentary and was stunned to see that I’d missed the whole of the second half. Must have been a late kick-off I thought.
I frantically started ploughing back through the @beesotted timeline again.
When Pompey scored again our situation looked totally hopeless … Brentford were down and out. But hang on. BWP to the rescue! Amazing!
Bees win
Huh? OK this is beyond amazing if it’s true but, er…how come?
I was confused once again as I thought that BWP’s goal leveled the match. I cursed as I trawled back through the timeline three more times to see exactly where I had missed the equaliser. I should have been ecstatic but I seriously thought either I’d had too much vodka or BillytheBee, Laney or Condorman’s thumbs had got into an optimistic tangle.
After an embarrassing amount of time the penny dropped. Even though it was clearly stated that BWP and Donaldson were the scorers. It all had happened too quickly to be true – less than one tweet/minute apart. Donaldson’s goal hadn’t registered at all – hence I thought the game had finished 2-2. I finally worked out that we’d won 3-2 but was so knackered from a full day’s work and then trying to sort this muddle out in my stupid brain that, instead of running naked around Red Square (as I promised to do if Brentford beat Pompey), I went straight to bed with a massive headache …. albeit also with a broad grin.
I don’t want to sound ungrateful for @beesotted’s hard work in keeping us infrequent visitors to Griffin Park in the picture but the moral of this story is simple – go to the game, it’s far less stressful.
Cleve West
The Brentford Gardener
@clevewest
When Cleve isn’t drinking overproof vodka, running around foreign lands naked or burying fanzines in obscure places around the country, he does a lovely bit of gardening